UNITS OF MEASUREMENT: ORAL TRADITION, TRANSLATION STUDIES AND CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Abstract

The study of the world’s verbal arts offers an opportunity to consider ways that computational analysis and modeling of narratives may lead to new understandings of how they are constructed, their dynamics and relationships. Similarly, as corpus linguistics operations must define metrics, it offers an occasion to review basic interpretive concepts such as “units of analysis, context, and genre." My essay begins with an admittedly cursory overview from a novice perspective of what capabilities corpus linguistics currently possesses for the analysis and modeling of narratives. Consideration is given to the epistemological issue in the social sciences with the positivistic prescription or empiricist description of units of analysis and the potential pitfalls or advantages corpus linguistics encounters in searching for adequate equivalent terms. This review leads naturally to reflection on the crucial determinative action of context on meaning and the extent to which current computational interfaces are able to account for and integrate into global analysis of linguistic and performance dimensions such as performer, intonation, gesture, diction, idioms and figurative language, setting, audience, time, and occasion. As a tentative conclusion from this review, it can be stated that  artificial intelligence for modeling narratives or devising narrative algorithms must develop capacities to account for performance dimensions in order to fulfill their analytical potential.

Keywords

• Narrative,interpretation,prosody,context,units of analysis

ÖLÇÜ BİRİMLERİ: SÖZLÜ GELENEK, ÇEVİRİ ÇALIŞMALARI VE BÜTÜNCE DİLBİLİMİ

Abstract

Dünya söz sanatları çalışması anlatıların sayısal analiz ve örneklemelerinin oluşturulması, dinamiklerinin ve birbirleriyle bağlantılarının yeniden anlamlandırılmaları için imkân sağlar.  Aynı şekilde, bütünce dilbilim çalışmaları ölçü bilimi tanımlarken, ‘‘birim analizi, bağlam ve tür’’ gibi temel yorumsal kavramları gözden geçirmeye imkan sunar. Makalem anlatıların analizi ve örneklemleri için bütünce dilbilimin hâlihazırda sahip olduğu yeni bir bakış açısıyla aslen yüzeysel bir incelemeyle başlamaktadır. Bütünce dilbilimin yeterli ve eşdeğer terimleri aramayla uğraşırken karşılaştığı birimlerin analizi ve olası güçlükler ya da avantajları pozitivist kurallar ya da ampirisizm tanımlamalarıyla birlikte sosyal bilimlerdeki epistemolojik (bilgikuramsal) mesele göz önüne alınmıştır. Bu inceleme doğal olarak bağlamın anlam üzerindeki önemli belirleyici etkisine ve halihazırdaki sayısal arabilimleri hesaplama, küresel dilbilim analiziyle ve konuşmacı, tonlama, el hareketleri, diksiyon, deyimler, mecazi söyleyişler, yer, seyirci, zaman ve olay gibi uygulama boyutlarıyla birleşmeye yol açmaktadır. Bu incelemeden çıkan kesin olmayan sonuç şudur: örnekleme anlatılar için olan yapay zeka ya da düzenleyici anlatı algoritmaları kapasitelerini analitik yeterliliklerini yerine getirebilmek amacıyla performans boyutlarını hesaplamak için geliştirmelidir.

Keywords

• Anlatı,yorum,ölçü,bağlam,analiz birimleri

References

1. ABELLO, James & BROADWELL, Peter et al. (2012). “Computational Folkloristics.” Communications of the ACM 55 (7): 60-70.
2. BECKER, A. L. (1995). Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
3. BEN-AMOS, Dan (1969). “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” Genre 2: 275-301.
4. BEN-AMOS, Dan (1983). “Introduction.” Research in African Literatures 14: 277-82.
5. BEN-AMOS, Dan (1992). “Do we Need Ideal Types (in Folklore)? An Address to Lauri Honko.” NIF Papers No. 2. Turku: Nordic Institute of Folklore.
6. BLACKBURN, Stuart H. & CLAUS, Peter J. et al. (1989). Oral Epics in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
7. BREMOND, Claude (1980). “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities.” New Literary History 11 (3): 387-411.
8. BREMOND, Claude (1982). “A Critique of the Motif.” In French Literary Criticism Today. 125-46. ed. Tsevtan Todorov. trans. R. Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9. BRUNER, Jerome (1991). “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 1-21.
10. DARÁNYI, Sándor & WITTEK, Peter et al. (2012). “Toward Sequencing ‘Narrative DNA’: Tale Types, Motif Strings, and Memetic Pathways. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative. Istanbul.
11. DE MUNCK, Victor (2000). “Introduction: Units for Describing and Analyzing Culture and Society.” Ethnology 39: 279-92.
12. DECLERCK, Thierr & LENDVAI, Piroska et al. (2012). “Multilingual and Semantic Extension of Folk Tale Catalogues”. Digital Humanities Conference, July 16-22. University of Hamburg. http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/?s=Declerck.
13. DUNDES, Alan (1968). “Introduction.” In Vladimir Propp, Morphology of he Folktale, 2d ed., xi-xvii. Austin: University of Texas Press.
14. DUNDES, Alan (1997). “The Motif-Index and the Tale Type Index: A Critique.” Journal of Folklore Research 34: 195-202.
15. ELSON, David K. & MCKEOWN, Kathleen R. (2009). “A Tool for Deep Semantic Encoding of Narrative Texts.” Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Software Demonstrations, 9-12. Suntec, Singapore.
16. ELSON, David K. & MCKEOWN, Kathleen R. “Building a Bank of Semantically Encoded Narratives.” http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~delson/pubs/LREC2010-ElsonMcKeown.pdf
17. FINLAYSON, Mark A. “Collecting Semantics in the Wild: The Story Workbench.” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. www.mit.edu/~markaf/doc/finlayson.aaaifs.6.2008.46.pdf
18. FINLAYSON, Mark A. “Deriving Narrative Morphologies via Analogical Story Merging.” www.mit.edu/~markaf/doc/finlayson.kokinov.nbupress.2009.137.pdf
19. FOLEY, John Miles and GEJIN, Chao (2012). “Challenges in Comparative Oral Epic.” Oral Tradition 27 (2): 381-418.
20. FRAWLEY, William (1984). “Prolegomena to a Theory of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 250-63. ed. Lawrence Venuti. London and New York: Routledge.
21. GEERTZ, Clifford (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
22. HANDLER, Richard (2009). “The Uses of Incommensurability in Anthropology.” New Literary History 40: 627-47.
23. HANSEN, William (1997). “Mythology and Folktale Typology: Chronicle of a Failed Scholarly Revolution.” Journal of Folklore Research 34: 274-280.
24. HARING, Lee (2001). “A Vade Mecum of Indexing.” FF Communications, 2: 20-22.
25. HARVILAHTI, Lauri (2014). “The SKVR Database of Ancient Poems of the Finnish People in Kalevala Meter and the Semantic Kalevala.” Oral Tradition 28 (2). Forthcoming. pp. 1-9.
26. JASON, Heda (1997). “Texture, Text, and Context of the Folklore Text vs. Indexing.” Journal of Folklore Research, 34: 221-25.
27. JASON, Heda (2000). Motif, Type and Genre. A Manual for Compilation of Indices & A Bibliography of Indices and Indexing. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tideakatemia; Academia Scientarum Fennica.
28. JENSEN, Mina Skafte (2005). “Performance.” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, 45-54. Ed. John Miles Foley. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishing.
29. KATZ, Joshua T. (2005). “The Indo-European Context.” A Companion to Ancient Epic, 20-30. ed. John Miles Foley. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishing.
30. KUGEL, James L. (1997). The Bible As It Was. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
31. LINDHAL, Carl (1997). “Some Uses of Numbers.” Journal of Folklore Research 34: 263-73.
32. LONG, Lynne (2005). Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters, Ltd.
33. LOUWERSE, Max (1997). “Bits and Pieces: Toward an Interactive Classification of Folktales.” Journal of Folklore Research, 34: 245-49.
34. MARZOLPH, Ulrich (2003). "Narrative Classification." In South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Ed. by Margaret A. Mills, Peter J. Claus, and Sarah Diamond. New York and London: Routledge. pp. 433-34.
35. MARZOLPH, Ulrich (2003). “’Folktale,’ ‘Tale Type’.” In South Asian Folklore, An Encylcopedia. Ed. by Margaret A. Mills, Peter J. Claus, and Sarah Diamond. New York and London: Routledge. pp. 220-22.
36. MUİSER, Iwe Everhardus Christiaan and THEUNE, Mariët et al. (2012). “Cleaning up and Standardizing a Folktale Corpus for Humanities Research.” pp. 1-12. https://pure.knaw.nl/portal/files/477360/ARCH.2012.muiser.pdf.
37. MUNDAY, Jeremy (2002). “Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics: An Interface for Disciplinary Co-operation.” Logos and Language 3 (1): 11-20.
38. REICHL, Karl, ed. and trans. (2007). Edige. A Karakalpak Oral Epic as performed by Jumabay Bazarov. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.
39. RUBEL, Paula and ROSMAN, Abraham (eds.) (2003). “Introduction: Translation and Anthropology.” In Translating Cultures. Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, 1-22. Oxford: Berg.
40. SCHMITT, Christoph. “Belief Narratives in Online Databases: Retrieval Scenarios and the Problem of Internationally Valid Indexing, Based on the Example of the Wossidia Project.” Catalogure of the 16th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research: Folk Narrative in the Modern World: Unity and Diversity, 179-80.
41. SNELLING-HORNBY, Mary (2006). The Turns of Translation Studies. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, PA: J. Benjamin.
42. UTHER, Hans-Jörg (2004). The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography. 3 vols. Helsinki: Suomaleainen Tiedeakatemia.
43. VELA, Mihaela & DECLERCK, Thierry. “Heuristics for Automated Text-Based Shallow Ontology Generation.” http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-401/iswc2008pd_submission_80.pdf.
44. WYATT, N. (2005). “Epic in Ugaritic Literature.” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, 247-54. ed. John Miles Foley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.